If you sell anything online in the United States, this is one of the few legal risks that arrives without warning, targets small businesses as readily as large ones, and is almost entirely preventable.
The numbers have been going one direction for years. There were 3,117 identified federal website accessibility filings in 2025, up 27 percent on the year before, and 2026 is tracking higher again. E-commerce absorbs most of it. In the first half of 2026, roughly 79 percent of digital accessibility suits targeted online stores.
Even a suit you would win costs money. Defending one with no damages awarded typically runs somewhere between 5,000 and 125,000 dollars in legal fees. Most businesses settle, because settling is cheaper than being right.
Why this happens to small businesses
There is a persistent belief that these cases target large companies. The filing data says otherwise. Plaintiff firms work at volume, and volume favours easy targets: sites with obvious, automatically detectable failures.
Obvious matters. Nobody is auditing your site by hand looking for edge cases. They are running scanners that flag missing alternative text, unlabelled form fields and unreadable colour contrast, then filing against whatever comes back worst. Fixing the detectable failures moves you out of that pool.
The shortcut that makes things worse
You will be offered an accessibility overlay. It is a script you paste into your site that promises to make it compliant automatically, usually for a modest monthly fee. It is an appealing offer and you should decline it.
Overlays sit on top of the page and attempt to patch problems at runtime. They routinely fail against real screen readers, and in several documented cases they actively interfere with the assistive technology a user has already configured. Being sued having installed one is not a defence, and plaintiffs have specifically named sites using them.
In January 2025 the Federal Trade Commission ordered accessiBe, one of the largest overlay vendors, to pay one million dollars to settle charges that it deceptively claimed its product could make any website compliant. When the regulator is fining the vendor for the promise, the promise is not protection.
What actually reduces your risk
The standard courts and settlements consistently reference is WCAG 2.1 at level AA. You do not need to memorise it. Most real world failures cluster in a handful of places.
- Images without alternative text. Every meaningful image needs a description. Decorative images need an explicitly empty one so screen readers skip them rather than reading a filename.
- Form fields without labels. A placeholder is not a label. It disappears when typing starts and screen readers handle it inconsistently.
- Colour contrast. Light grey text on white is the single most common failure on well designed sites. Body text needs a ratio of at least 4.5 to 1.
- Keyboard access. Try navigating your checkout with the tab key alone. If you cannot see where focus is, or you get stuck inside a menu, that is a genuine barrier and an easy one to prove.
- Video without captions. Auto captions are a starting point, not a finish.
None of this is exotic. It is the work of days on most sites, not months, and it is permanent. We treat it as part of building rather than a separate product, which is why it sits inside how we design rather than beside it.
Where the effort should go first
If you have a store, start with the path to purchase. Product page, cart, checkout. That is where the suits concentrate, because that is where a barrier stops someone completing a transaction, which is the argument that wins.
Then the pages that carry your enquiry forms. Then everything else.
An accessible checkout also converts better for everyone. Larger tap targets, clear focus states, readable labels and sensible error messages help a customer on a cracked phone screen in bad light as much as they help a screen reader user.
Getting an honest picture of where you stand
Run an automated scan first, because it is free and it catches the failures most likely to be used against you. Then do the keyboard test yourself. Between them you will find most of what matters in an afternoon.
What automated tools cannot tell you is whether your alternative text is useful or whether your page makes sense read aloud in order. That takes a person, and it is worth doing once properly rather than never.
See how we work with US businesses, or send us your URL and we will tell you plainly what a scanner would find.
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